THE 21ST-CENTURY AUTHORITARIAN IN WESTERN 'DEMOCRACIES'--"OPEN MARKETS, CLOSED MINDS": "WHAT WOULD GEORGE ORWELL THINK?"

Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2011) ("The twentieth century could be seen as a race between two versions of the man-made Hell--the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won--from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we'd have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in." "But with the notorious 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001, all that changed Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once--open markets, closed minds--because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturer's dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and the junta in Argentina--all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it--their ways of silencing troublesome dissent. Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things, openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the West are tacitly legitimizing the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us toward the improved world--the utopia we're promised--dystopia must first hold sway. It's a concept worthy of doublethink. It's also, in its ordering of events, strangely Marxist. First, the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which lots of heads must roll; then the pie-in-the-sky classless society, which oddly enough never materialize. Instead we just get pigs with whips." "What would George Orwell have to say about it? I often ask myself." "Quite a lot." Id. at 148-149 (italic added). Food food thought.).